Business Leaders Should Lead – and Volunteer

By Curt Weeden

The catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, may have reversed a downward trend in American volunteerism. In many instances, however, volunteerism is turning into a quick-hit experience, with people often engaging in an annual or semiannual day of service. Not that short-term volunteerism is unwelcome. The problem is that nonprofit groups are desperate for another kind of volunteer who is much harder to find: one who is skilled in such areas as administration and technology and willing to contribute over the long haul. Indeed, so vital are such volunteers that the future of many charities may hang in the balance.

For nonprofit groups, the wellspring for such volunteers has long been the business world. Perhaps the best hunting grounds of all are the 10,000-plus publicly traded companies that employ more than half the workers in the United States. Several of those corporations are talking up volunteerism like never before. In fact, in recent years employee volunteerism among some of these larger businesses has become downright voguish. A study in 2000 by Hill and Knowlton/Yankelovich Partners offers a possible explanation. In part, the study concluded that the public is more impressed with a company when its employees volunteer than when it simply gives charity a large check.

If corporations get a higher approval rating when donating hours rather than dollars, it stands to reason that businesses would want to encourage employees to establish long-term relationships with nonprofit organizations. In reality, however, that is not always what happens. Instead, some corporations prefer the splashy once-a-year volunteer extravaganzas that mobilize large groups of employees for a few hours of highly promotable community service.

As valuable as short-term volunteering might be, even more important for many charities are those relationships between company employees and nonprofit groups that continue for months or years.

Northwestern Mutual, in Milwaukee, for example, gives a $500 grant to each charity where a company employee (or retiree) has volunteered 40 hours or more each year. At Starbucks, a longtime advocate of volunteerism that also runs numerous community-improvement programs, one-third of all executives serve on nonprofit boards. And dozens of workers at General Mills, which has a long history of contributing to the greater community good, volunteer engineering, financial, marketing, legal, and management expertise to a remarkable entrepreneurial venture called Siyeza, which created a food-processing plant that is providing jobs to residents of north Minneapolis. While there are several companies with such model employee-volunteerism programs, the roster of corporations that could do more to get employees fully engaged with charities has much room to grow.

And that growth has a better chance of happening if it comes from the top down, meaning this: If each senior manager in every large corporation were to play an instrumental role in at least one nonprofit organization, companies would have a template for responsible business behavior that could be used at all levels of a company. “Instrumental” means doing more than serving as a letterhead board member who does little or nothing beyond showing up (maybe) for the group’s annual dinner. It means taking an active role in guiding and genuinely helping the organization.

Getting chief executive officers and other high-level executives fully engaged in volunteerism will yield big returns for nonprofit groups. But the business world may benefit even more.

It was only a few years ago when David Rockefeller warned the New York Economic Club that corporations were experiencing a serious decline in statesmanship. “Business leaders appear to have devoted themselves to making more and more money and find themselves with less and less time to devote to civic and social responsibilities,” he said.

While Mr. Rockefeller received polite applause for his speech in 1997, whatever kudos came his way never morphed into organizational change. America continues to suffer a dearth of business-executive talent plugged into “outside” education, health-care, civic, cultural, and public-service groups.

At a time when company executives are scrambling to find ways to restore public confidence in America’s scandal-marred businesses, the return of corporate statesmanship is long overdue. It would serve the best interests of business to use productive volunteerism as a way of mending fences with the world outside the office and manufacturing plant. In January, a blue-ribbon panel called the Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise gave corporate executives a high-profile fence-repairing opportunity. The commission was charged with coming up with suggestions for how corporate America could regain some of the luster it lost in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco International, and other debacles. The panel — made up of a dozen corporate executives, investors, and business-policy experts — urged companies to “carefully consider” establishing separate offices at the top of a business: one for the CEO and another for the board chairman.

The recommendation has run into stiff resistance — especially from industry captains who wear both the CEO and chairman hats (68 percent of companies with revenue of $800-million or more are run by CEO’s who are also board chairmen). Those executives don’t want the split because, they say, CEO’s need the board title so that employees, investors, and other interested parties will clearly understand who is in charge of a corporation.

The commission might have presented a stronger argument for divorcing the two executive functions had it replayed David Rockefeller’s call for a resurrection of the business statesman. By divvying up internal responsibilities between a CEO and chairman, logic says that high-level corporate executives should have more time to get meaningfully engaged with issues and concerns that are not directly related to the day-to-day operations of their companies — including volunteerism.

Top-level business executives would do themselves and their businesses a favor by promoting and practicing volunteerism as a way to recapture the public’s trust. As leaders, they should lead, becoming “embedded” volunteers — people who are committed to a deep, continuing relationship with an organization. By example, they will show their corporate colleagues how substantial connections between business and charity can prove advantageous to everyone.

Curt Weeden is president of the Contributions Academy, a Mount Pleasant, S.C., organization that provides training to corporate grant makers, and author of

Corporate Social Investing (Berrett-Koehler Publishers).